IBM Introduces New Software, Services To Help Clients Transform Their Business Processes To Fuel Growth

IBM (NYSE:IBM) today unveiled new software and services aimed at helping organizations transform their business processes to increase efficiency, reduce costs and ultimately find new ways to grow their businesses.

One of the key challenges that organizations face is the ability to see an integrated view of business processes across their organizations and ecosystems, in order to quickly recognize and take advantage of new market opportunities and better meet the changing needs of their customers.

Recognizing these challenges, IBM is delivering a new unified Business Process Management (BPM) platform, IBM Business Process Manager, that gives clients unparalleled visibility into key business operations so they can model, automate, monitor and adjust plans instantly. As a result, both large and small companies can now drive growth and responsiveness by continuously improving business processes, such as those found in product development, customer service and finance departments.

The new software builds on IBM’s leadership in the BPM marketplace, which has seen rapid growth as companies seek new ways to streamline and accelerate their business processes to not only reduce costs, but also drastically improve productivity. According to Gartner, Inc., BPM spending had jumped 9.2 percent in 2010, and IBM was named the top vendor with more than double the market share of any other company. (1)

This growth is supported by recent studies showing that inefficient business processes cost Fortune 500 companies alone more than $480 billion dollars a year. This statistic is even greater in the public sector, where organizations have lost up to $1.3 trillion dollars per year through inefficiency. (2) As a result, increasing efficiency has been identified as one of the greatest priorities for organizations worldwide. (3)

Nationwide Insurance, one of the largest diversified insurance and financial services organizations in the U.S., is just one example of how companies are transforming their business processes to boost efficiency.

“Using IBM business process management technology, we have been able to boost the efficiency and accuracy of our financial reporting system, which pulls information from more than 300 independent subsidiaries,” said Tammy Craig, Nationwide Vice President of Information Technology. “With all data going through one central business rules management system, we have streamlined complex processes, allowing us to focus even greater attention on serving the needs of our customers.”

“We look to partner with market leaders and IBM Business Process Manager will help enable process excellence across our organization and for our customers,” said Jürgen Rudolph – IT Querschnitt, Versicherungskammer Bayern Insurance (VKB), a leading German insurer.

Lincoln Trust Company, one of the leading independent U.S. providers of self-directed IRA accounts, is another example. To date, Lincoln Trust Company’s BPM program, enabled by IBM software and services, has achieved the following benefits:

· Cost savings of between $3 and $4 million

· Ongoing annual savings of $325,000, which will increase as Lincoln Trust’s business grows

· A reduction in document processing times, in some cases from hours to minutes

· Increased revenue resulting from better customer service

· Reductions in financial risk posed by mistakes

“Our business process transformation has differentiated Lincoln Trust in the marketplace,” said Helen Z. Cousins, executive vice president and CIO, Lincoln Trust Company. “Through automation and process simplification, we’ve leapfrogged larger competitors in terms of our superior ability to on-board and service customers.”

New Services to Improve Performance

As part of today’s announcement, IBM also announced the creation of a global consulting and services delivery organization that will give decision makers the power to improve the performance of core business processes such as marketing, human resources and finance, as well as industry specific processes such as insurance claims, campaign management and compliance.

Drawing on the expertise of thousands of IBM consultants from around the world, the new practice will provide solutions at all phases of process transformation, from enterprise strategy and governance to specific process solutions. IBM BPM and service oriented architecture experts will provide these services from a variety of locations in the U.S. and around the world.

The new services will be delivered via a new methodology, called the IBM Method for Business Process Optimization. The new service from IBM Global Services will utilize IBM best practices to allow clients to address the agility and complexity gaps in their businesses, to achieve better business outcomes from their data and processes.

Today, IBM is also introducing a range of new and enhanced products and services designed to help businesses transform their processes to increase efficiencies. Key among these are:

· IBM Blueworks Live – A Software as a Service (SaaS), cloud-based offering that accelerates business processes by allowing better visibility and communication across an organization

· IBM BPM Industry Packs – Software designed to accelerate and enhance the delivery of standards-based industry solutions for banking, healthcare and telecommunications

These new products represent the industry’s largest portfolio dedicated to helping organizations improve all aspects of their business processes. The new products are being demonstrated to clients during the IMPACT 2011 conference.

With this announcement, IBM is focusing on three of the key areas that clients and business leaders worldwide have identified as key to their success: gaining effective insight into their markets; tuning their business processes to take advantage of these insights; and enhancing their infrastructures to execute these new business processes. The essential components of any service oriented architecture (SOA), these BPM offerings further enhance IBM’s position as the worldwide leader in the SOA market (4) by providing the new products and services that help clients respond to rapid changes in the marketplace in order to gain a competitive advantage.

This year’s IMPACT conference features more than 8,000 attendees and hundreds of client testimonials, presentations, workshops and product demos, making IMPACT 2011 the largest worldwide conference created to meet the growing demand for an educational forum around business agility.

For more information on all of the new products announced today, including IBM Business Process Manager and IBM’s full BPM product and service portfolio, visit: www.ibm.com/bpm

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